


and heaven is betting on us

by stellatiate



Series: anthologie [3]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 17:12:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1949451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellatiate/pseuds/stellatiate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s hard for him to remember when the worst of it all begins (but when it does, it all seems to fall apart). And Zuko doesn’t understand it, because a love tempered by three years’ time seems well on its course to longevity, to a storybook legend of two souls welded together. He <i>loves</i> her, more than himself, enough to collapse the stars in space. But that’s hardly enough.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-—katara & zuko. au, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. zutara week.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. help me stop the hurting — melancholy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they step together with stone feet into the ocean.

Zuko and Katara hold hands quietly, like a secret.

“This is the first time,” the doctor says with a smile, somber eyes fixed onto Zuko’s slumped shoulders, “this is the first time a couple has come here.” He can feel his cracked resolve, as if it is tangible and can be chipped apart with his bare hands.

Neither of them return the doctor’s smile. Katara’s hand flexes around his and Zuko can feel every pattern she traces along his knuckles, as if it is amplified here and only here.

When she hangs her head, he cannot see her face anymore, and it gives him a light, lurch of panic in his chest.

“It’s for the best,” she says gently, as if words could shatter something delicate between them, as if she can speak this lie into existence as truth.

The doctor looks between the two of them with an earnest expression, and then he nods slowly, thoughtfully. Zuko watches him closely, watches the way he takes careful notes about the state of the two of them. And all the while, he wants to clasp his hands in his lap, he wants to be alone. But he holds her hand because it won’t last, this will be over, they will be _free_ and _happy_ and distant, distant memories.

“Very well.” He sighs before he hands them a folder stacked with papers. The doctor turns back to his desk, sits down noiselessly and watches them. And it unnerves small parts of him, to be presented in front of this man and have him simply pick apart the way he and Katara are, as if that is the secret to the essence of their relationship.

“You have one week.” His voice is heavy, stern. “Fill out the paperwork, bring back whatever it asks you to, and it will be done. If you change your mind, you cannot come back, no matter what.”

He leans across the space of his desk, searches for Katara’s fallen gaze and Zuko’s shameful blush, “if one of you comes alone, it will be done for them and them alone. Choose wisely; if I allow you to forget one another, it cannot be undone.”

His ominous words sit heavily in the space between them; Katara nods, her face unflinching, her eyes an ocean of sadness.

“I understand,” she says quietly, and it is her, with her gentle strokes against the backs of his knuckles, it is _she_ who decides to let go of his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no one gave me permission to write this _an eternal sunshine of the spotless mind_ au but i took it upon myself to wreak that havoc lmfao.


	2. forever only you, my star — jubilant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and the hardest part of this is leaving you.

“Are we supposed to do these together?”

Zuko catches sight of her leaning in the threshold and it reminds him of breakfast in bed, reminds him of the mornings that she’d wander in deliriously tired from overnight shifts and watch him sleep. But this is different. She lifts the folder up and presses her lips together in a tight frown.

“I don’t know.” In all honesty, this is painful enough; he can’t help but wonder if there is actually any merit to this paperwork other than to sit down and cause them both mutual misery.

He sits up from where he’d been lying in bed, twists the covers from his chest and watches as she wanders over; her ocean eyes curl waves over the bed and it is only with great deliberation that she sits on the edge, opens the folder and spreads it between the two of them.

He’d have never imagined that space to be so large.

The letterhead at the top is for the doctor’s office and there are several questions on the first page alone, with a simple title: _the basics_.

“I mean,” Katara ducks her chin to her chest, spirals of hair falling and shielding her face for a moment. She reaches up to tuck it behind her ear and then glances in his direction. “Pet names? Favorite physical attribute?”

Zuko’s cheeks turn red immediately. “It would make sense if we did it together,” he scoots over towards her, runs a hand through the messy spike of his hair as he looks over the questions, “we’ll see each other’s answers if we don’t already know them.”

Something in Katara’s eyes says _no, no, absolutely_ not, but she scoots over closer to him, uncaps her pen slowly.

 _“_ When we started dating,” she says aloud between the two of them, “it’s almost three years.” Her voice is wistful, heavy. Zuko wants nothing more than to embrace her, than to hold her in his arms, and he can’t wait for all of that pain to be erased.

He leans over to look at the question list. “Favorite memory together is actually one of these?”

“What’s yours?” Katara puts down his initials and circles them, differentiates their answers in that form.

It feels like he sifts through every memory he has of them together and still comes up with nothing but sand and glass and little slivers of different memories altogether.

“I can’t think of just one,” he frowns, looks down and away from her.

Katara’s hand tangles in the ends of her hair thoughtfully, looping curls around her index and middle fingers. “Mine’s easy,” she says, half of a smile tugging across her lips, “it’s when Sokka pushed you into our pool.”

A laugh catches in her throat and she stops; Zuko watches the way it filters through her features, silenced on her lips but present in her eyes, present in the glow of her cheeks. He remembers it easily, shamefully. He’d grabbed Katara by the thick plait down her back and dragged her into the pool with a holler (and spent the rest of the night drunkenly wrapped up in one another in her bathtub, soaking wet clothes stuck to their bodies, hair stuck to each other’s skin). They hadn’t even kissed—just made complete fools of themselves and fallen asleep there—but it’d still been one of her favorite stories to tell.

“Even though I pulled your hair?”

His eyebrow raises and Katara nods firmly, comfortingly. “Even though you pulled my hair.”

She smiles, and it disarms him (and he wonders if he can finish this paperwork at _all_ ).


	3. love turned bad, left for me to blame — motorcycle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> erasing the past doesn't alleviate the pain of the present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i swear this whole thing isn't depressing, this is just a really heavy section.

It’s hard for him to remember when the worst of it all begins (but when it does, it all seems to fall apart). And Zuko doesn’t understand it, because a love tempered by three years’ time seems well on its course to longevity, to a storybook legend of two souls welded together. He _loves_ her, more than himself, enough to collapse the stars in space.

But that’s hardly enough.

They only coexist now, in perfect asynchronous events; he can see the rings from her glass of tea when he sits to eat all alone, she can feel the warmth in the corner of the couch as if he is still there, still reading his book silently. And at the end of the night, they sleep back to back but never touching, never breathing, never alert to each other’s senses.

Until now. And it throws everything off, the sight of her walking into their apartment and sitting at the table with him as if he is not already a distant memory, and Zuko stares at her over his half-eaten sandwich until she coughs into her hand.

“I wanted to ask you something,” she mumbles, her fingers resting on the table’s edge, and something skips in his chest, fills with a nervous air that makes him want to hold his breath.

He is speechless for a moment. And then, “ahh, what is it?”

Katara worries her fingers through her hair, a terrifying nervous habit that has reared its head ever since this whole thing began, ever since their demise was made known. She glances away from him for a moment and when she refocuses, her eyes are apologetic.

“We’re doing this, aren’t we?”

Zuko flinches, so swiftly that maybe she won’t notice, and then he nods. There is no going back, not from this.

“Well,” her voice is thick and slow, molasses dripping sweetly in his ear, until, “I have a date. At the end of the week.” Her eyes flicker with some hidden emotion but Zuko can’t figure it out, can’t find words or thoughts or anything else.

“I’m sorry, Zuko.”

“No,” his mouth moves before he can think, before he can say _don’t be sorry,_ I _should be sorry_ , “you’re not.”

It strikes perfectly. Katara’s face catches on sadness, then anger, and then a mixture of both repressed behind the smooth lines of her face. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She stands up and flattens the wrinkles of her dress down over her legs, glares across the gap between them.

“It’s definitely not what I wanted to hear, no.”

“So what?” She asks him, saturated with disdain, “you’re _always_ like this, it doesn’t matter who I see. You’re always _jealous_.”

Zuko’s cheeks burn bright with shame at the sentiment. He has always had a jealous streak, always been possessive of her in a selfish way, and even though he was on the verge of letting her go, there was still some reason why it surfaced in the most ugly of ways, during the most inconvenient times.

“Who cares,” he mumbles, looks back down at his plate, “go.” And something vicious within him chimes when she turns her back, because even though they will soon forget all of this pain, all of the broken things between the two of them, it doesn’t make it less real to him in those moments as he watches her walk away.

Katara closes the apartment door behind her with a quiet click, and he doesn’t have to wonder for very long on the thoughts of who her date is. There is an engine outside of his door, the twist of a throttle in hand, and a peel of tires away from the front of their complex.

Zuko knows exactly who it is. And he doesn’t want to think about it anymore.


	4. running from you is my best defense — cobalt blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the first day it all drips away.

This appointment seems to be an unnecessary, intermediary step in the process, but they are there, barely. It is a note scrawled on their apartment refrigerator with no other notice: _three o’clock_. And it is the only reason why they are there together, sitting a distance apart on the couch, looking at everything but the vulnerable depths of each other’s eyes.

“How has it been?”

The honest answer is bitter in the hollow of his throat, bubbling with shame and confusion and speechlessness. The nurse smiles at the two of them and Zuko can’t imagine, can’t figure out what there is to smile about.

“Hard,” Katara breathes and his eyes meet hers for what feels like the first time since this all began. They are tidal, an ocean of thoughts, and the slightest bit of sadness dripping within them. “It doesn’t matter that I—we both chose this. It’s still hard.”

She nods, a haunted smile trapped on her lips. “Very true. The reason we have these appointments are to talk about this procedure as much as possible. It isn’t supposed to be easy. We do not do this for fun.” She glances between the two of them, flips open the folder with all of their questions answered on it.

Zuko feels as though he is forgetting her already: the feeling of her hand in his is but a habit faintly washed away, the sound of her late story whispers, the explosiveness of their arguments, the gentleness of their kisses. It’s like grasping at air for the sensations of each of them, to remind himself what it is like before he truly forgets.

“These questions all illustrate a map of each other in your mind,” she says solemnly, looks at Zuko before she turns her gaze onto Katara, “from the moment you met up until now. It is these memories we will search for, like a beacon in the darkness of your mind, until the rest are lit up like constellations. It will be swift and easy and irreversible.”

All of the benchmarks are clear in his head, like meeting her three years ago through her brother, kissing her on her birthday, falling into the pool, moving in together. It’s all of these pleasant memories that reminds him there is a dark side as well, there were nights when they slept away from each other, nights where they created fierce grudges and ran into problems that did not have simple answers.

“Go home,” she says to the two of them, approaches them and lays a hand on each of their shoulders, “talk. You have a lot to say, trust me.”

And it doesn’t feel that way because the more conversation he imagines, the more pain follows it, entrenches his thoughts to where they do nothing but drown him. But Katara is the one who grabs his hand and fills it with warmth, replenishes his waning memory with the softness of her palms, and draws her into the comforting blue of his eyes.


	5. here’s the news about loving you — unrequited

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a bitter kiss and a fall from grace; the day she asks a thousand questions.

She falls back into the habit of holding his hand, and there is a change. Her touch is no longer light and whimsical, but secure, as if he will be carried away by the wind if not anchored by her. And sometimes, this endeavor feels like just that; a slow, painful wait for her to let go of him so that he may be swept up by the winds of forgetfulness.

Even still, she holds his hand.

“Hard,” he says when they are sitting on their bed, her fingers woven in the space between his, “this has been hard for you?”

Katara turns her head sharply and the incredulity on her face speaks volumes above the sound of her voice. “Of course it has been,” she is defensive and nothing else, “if it was easy to separate, we would be separated already, you know.”

It is the truth. He does not want to let go of her, but they are so deeply rooted within one another that there is nothing but fluctuations between love and hate, peace and chaos. Zuko loves her fiercely, but he defies her fiercely as well; Katara would drown the world for him, yet it is he who drowns because of her.

And so, they must let go.

Zuko nods, squeezes her hand gently. “It will be easier once forgotten,” he glances at her, tries to erase the shape of her face from his thoughts, “and it will be better.”

Her silence rings in his ears as protest because he can feel the tension in her bones like he has slipped beneath her skin. Katara turns in the space between them, touches their knees together so she can face him completely. He is so used to seeing the strength in her eyes that the newfound crumbling weakness behind the deep sea of her gaze alarms him.

“And we will be better for that? Better to forget and fall into this pattern with each other again? Who’s to say we won’t?”

Zuko doesn’t have that answer. As much as he wanted this to be a last resort, there was no way he could just walk away from Katara; there was no way he could live his life knowing she was somewhere with someone else, not loving him. And she’d felt the same way once before, but now, _now_ she was asking these questions, drawing up doubts.

His shoulders lift in a shrug. “We have two days left together,” his lips are pressed into a thin, chapped line, “as long as we’re still going through with this, yes?”

_No_ , rests on the curve of his mouth, but he swallows it down.

Katara sighs into the air, leans into him and sighs into his mouth with a smooth kiss. It is this that he is unsure of how to forget on his own, because time can erase the malaise between them, but there is no way to erase all of the beauty, all of the passion that tangled the two of them together in the first place.

“Yes, we are,” she says, and it is _goodbye_ , “but was it really ever going to be any other way?”

This time, he does not swallow it down. “No.” His voice is resolute, with a touch of sadness. “No, it wasn’t.”


	6. i'll miss you more than anything in my life — socks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it is not just clothes she must pack away.

Zuko and Katara are watching a movie when the call comes; not so much watching their movie as they are tangled together on the couch, shamelessly touching each other in innocent ways between shift scenes and filler moments. And in his thoughts, it is akin to touching the surface of the sun, because all he has done in the last few days is wait for every single thing between them to become incendiary, wait for everything to burst into flames.

But it hasn’t, not yet, not until the phone rings.

It startles the both of them in the darkness of their room, but Katara climbs over him to reach for the receiver. “Hello?” He doesn’t think twice, doesn’t sit up from where they were slumped comfortable, and she leans her head into his chest as she listens ardently.

“Oh,” her breath catches in her throat and Zuko’s eyes follow the change of expression on her face, the sudden sadness that lingers there, “right, of course.”

There is a static silence on the other end of the phone and he can feel her squirming at his side. And then, she covers the end of the telephone, standing up from their bed. He looks at her, the violent toss of her curly hair, the repentance in her eyes, and she walks out of the room.

Something inside of him feels dangerously warm, like it will catch fire, like he has finally began to burn up in the atmosphere of this perilous, beautiful sun. The movie plays, but Zuko doesn’t so much watch it as he does rifle through his thoughts. There are a million curses lingering at the back of his mouth, waiting to be spewed for his stupidity.

And as if there is some transparency still, something still between the two of them, Katara reappears. Her eyes are hardened, a storm at sea behind her lashes, and she approaches the side of his bed with a measured step, as if she will stand too close to him and be ensnared all over again.

She leans over and her hair spreads like a curtain over her shoulder. Her fingers climb along the side of his face, rest in the grooves of his scar, and she rubs her thumb across the bridge of his nose, over the sharpness of his cheeks. Zuko’s face flushes instantly with the way she stares at him, and she climbs into his lap.

“I love you,” Katara says, those three words a knife in her chest, rendering her voice weak, “I love you _so much_.”

And she does not mean to trigger anything, but when he kisses her, she can’t help it. It surprises Zuko, because she is the one who melts in his arms and not the other way around, and she is the one who cannot stop touching him, who kisses him until her lips threaten to bleed and then kisses him some more.

“I love you, too,” he admits, and can’t help but think that he’ll miss her, too; Katara was volatile and passionate but she was good for him, good for everything in his life up until now. Forgetting seemed to be able to erase all of his pain, but it’d erase his gratefulness as well.

They fall asleep exactly that way, with Katara in his lap and her arms around his waist and Zuko’s face buried into the side of her hair and the movie replaying in the background.

When Zuko wakes up in the morning, there is a space in his arms where she left him, open and vulnerable; when he wakes up, everything of hers is packed and gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was a pretty loose interpretation of the prompt having to do with her leaving, so sorry for the vagueness.


	7. i don't want to lose her again — slow dancing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> everything rewinds until the tape is blank.

His eyes close and it seems as if he will never wake. Zuko feels the nurse’s fingers on his pulse, erratic fireworks going off underneath his skin until it drips into threads, into faint colors in the sky and he is gone, _so gone_. There is no going back from this, not now that he is pressed into this sterile chair and having his memories torn out of him, having everything obliterated.

It is when his memories bleed across his thoughts in reverse that his heart climbs its way into his throat.

…

“Katara,” he hears the voice of the doctor reverberating in his head, “I need you to be alone.”

He immediately recognizes this moment from the night before, watches her as she watches him with moon-wide sad eyes fixed onto him, and when she leaves the room, he watches himself collapse like a star, fallen.

“I have your analysis done.” Everything mixes together in his head, because he can hear the sound of his breathing, hear the voice of the doctor on the other end, hear the loud pace of Katara’s heart in his ears.

Her voice is a whisper. “And?”

“And unless you change your mind, we are prepared to carry on tomorrow. Everything will go smoothly and both you and Zuko are ready. Are you having doubts?”

Zuko feels his own heart beating in his chest, trying to break its way out of the cage of his chest. Her answer, he thinks, is what breaks it free.

“Yes,” a tremor in her throat, but she continues, “I don’t know if I can anymore.”

There is a silence that lasts a lifetime, that last three years, that lasts as long as the movie they watch. And then the doctor’s cough on the other side of the phone rings in her ears, rings in his head.

“Say goodbye.” His voice is firm and Katara’s resolve is not; Zuko listens to the sound of her breaking and the sound of his heart ripping out of him and the sound of this sterile, blank memory. “Say goodbye, and take everything of yours out of your apartment.”

 _No_ , Zuko thinks, softly at first until it is a crescendo, until it is a scream in his head, _why would you do this?_

He can hear her tears through the wall when it is like this, but when she returns to the room, she looks cleansed, she looks so vulnerable. She climbs into his lap and Zuko can feel her warmth again, her fingers against his face and her body against him.

“I love you,” she says weakly, “I love you _so much_.”

Zuko kisses her, and then closes his eyes.

…

They are screaming. They are _always_ screaming.

“Why is that _always_ the case? Whenever we have this conversation, Zuko,” her voice is jagged, it is serrated and ready to tear everything it slashes across, “it’s always _me_ and _my things_ that have to acquiesce to _you_. I have my own life and my own ambitions, okay?”

He remembers this. He remembers the anger that bubbled underneath his skin, hot and abrupt and uncontrollable. That was always Zuko’s problem, explosive like a volcano, pouring out lava and cooling down only to have swept everything up in his fire.

He winces before he ever hears his flammable response.

“Then have your own life,” his voice is thick and admonishing, and Katara is jarred visibly, “have your own life and leave me alone.”

…

“Zuko,” she says quietly, and he knows, _he knows_ , “I got accepted into this program out-of-state.”

The argument begins before he can even _think_ of anything else. (Which is a shame, because perhaps he may have realized later on how _happy_ he was for her, how happy he was that she was finally getting what she wanted.)

…

“What did you say?”

The beach is his favorite place. It has always been his favorite place and Zuko smiles at the smell of the salt water, smiles at the curling waves and the sand under his feet. But his heart is light and full of nervousness.

“I, uh,” his hands are folded into his lap, his cheeks flushed. “I said that—Katara, you don’t have to say anything, you know, I just—” I love you, it beats in his chest, I love you, I love you, _I love you_.

She’s laughing like all of the happiness in the world is contained in her chest. “Zuko,” her smile is contagious, and Zuko flushes on the inside and outside of her thoughts, “just say it again, okay?”

He can see the shift in his own face, the gradual smile that floats along his lips. “Katara,” his eyes look like the sun when he looks at her, “I love you. I’m in love with you.”

The sun glints over her hair, a brilliant russet curled along her shoulders, and he wishes he could see her eyes, because though he remembers the way she looks at him, he just wants to _see_ it, just one more time.

“I love you, too,” she leans forward, bumps her forehead along his, and her eyes are cast into shadow, “I’m in love with you, too.”

…

“Everything is wet,” she laughs as she steps into the bathtub, strips off the sweater that clings to her shoulders. Zuko is behind her, his hair sticking up at odd angles, climbing into the bathtub behind her.

He sits in the tub suddenly, a squelching noise as he lands with a thud and a groan. Katara twists around to look at him and Zuko realizes it is a very good thing that he couldn’t see up her skirt, a good thing that he wasn’t thinking about it at that moment in time.

Zuko watches full of nostalgia, full of anticipation.

After a moment, she falls down too, between the brace of his lap and leans back. A laugh is in her throat, caught in her words. “Are you okay?”

His face flushes. “No,” he says, “I should be asking if you’re okay! I mean, I pulled your hair.” He touches her hair, the unraveling braid sliding down her back.

This is the moment that becomes clear, for a matter of seconds; Katara leans back into the brace of his arms, her wet hair pressed into his chest, and his eyes widen. And it is vital as he watches all the wheels turn in his head, until he finally sits back in the tub with a smile.

“I’m fine,” she says in a low voice, like she is slowly falling asleep, “I’m fine right where I am.”

…

For some reason, the last memory to fade from his thoughts is not their first memory together, but one wedged in between the trials of their life; one where Zuko is holding her close with his hands on her waist and her arms are curled around his shoulders. And they are alone in their living room, a sadness swaddled in between their bodies, and though he cannot remember why, he can feel the sadness with an acute pain.

He watches them like they are a trinket atop a treasure chest, swaying slowly and spinning in each other’s arms, ready to fall into one another and become one.

All he’s ever done was remind himself how much he loved her, how much she truly meant to him; but all of that is forgotten, now.

…

Zuko wakes up with a gasp, and the world is nothing but beyond-white light.

 


	8. if i'm somebody else, it never happened to me — epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they will learn how to be different people, how to love and love anew.

The last thing he expects is to see _her_ when he opens his apartment door.

She holds a box in her hands, bright blue eyes staring through him with an expression that reminds him of the sensation of sadness. Zuko frowns at the sight, wedges his door open a little further, and finally collects himself enough to ask an important question.

“Do I know you?”

Her sadness deepens, if not for a moment, and she drops her head down just a notch. Her hair catches the ends of the box, unruly curls, and she grips the box with one hand to toss it out of her face with her other hand. A bottomless sigh, and then she blinks the ocean out of her eyes again.

“My name is Katara,” she says, adjusts the box in her grip, “I used to—we were _in love_ , once.”

Zuko blinks absently at her. It sounds like a sleeping tale, like some ancient history that seems vaguely familiar but easily forgotten. He has been alone for as long as he can remember, though there are instances where he feels like he has retraced his steps into a part of his life he has already lived.

Maybe Katara is part of that underlined life.

She waddles through the threshold when he pushes the door open, and it is only after watching her fingernails dent into the bottom of the box that he takes it from her, sets it down onto the coffee table in front of them. Katara sinks into his couch and reaches into the box, unfolds a photo that creases the line between Zuko’s eyebrows.

“I don’t know if I understand it,” she says as he leans towards her, peeks at the photo in her hands, “but it’s—”

“—This is _us_ ,” his face flushes at the photo. He has just met this girl, but she holds a photo of them kissing the grins off of one another’s mouths in front of some blossoming tree in the park, and he feels like perhaps there is some part of him that stopped existing because of this.

Zuko sits down beside her, glances over the top of the box. She is silent, too, as she reaches for more momentos contained within the box. There is some indescribable feeling within him as he catches sight of things tucked away in there, coffee mugs and folded t-shirts and posters and letters, something like someone giving him a box full of chipped memories.

“Where did you get this?” Zuko pulls another picture from the stack, a crooked close-up of Katara and her sea-worn eyes and a red t-shirt that he _knows_ belongs to him, because he has washed it over and over and over again.

He wonders how close he has come to her without ever truly _knowing_ her.

Katara smiles like she can remember it all, every little thing she unearths from their past. “It was given to me. I just wish I knew what to do about it.”

He doesn’t understand it as much as she does; she fumbles over the explanation, the briefly touched upon subject of memory loss, and the fallout from the doctor whom had practiced it on dozens and dozens of others. Zuko doubts he will ever understand, but there is something inside of him that feels loyal to her, that feels he must at least honor the soul within him that fell in love with this girl, once.

Katara shifts beside him, and Zuko doesn’t know why, but he touches his fingertips to the backs of her knuckles. “Would it be terrible to try again?” His own voice is faraway, and so is the look in her eyes.

But then she smiles, and he can feel the push of her fingers between the spaces of his fingers. Zuko smiles, too. “It’s already terrible we didn’t try hard enough before.” There is still a huge box of things to go through, he knows, but there is just a need for him to dive head-first into this, with no regrets and no forewarning and nothing but blind stumbling through their past for a second time.

He doesn’t mind it (and he doesn’t think that she does, either, so).

Zuko and Katara hold hands quietly, like a secret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i like cyclical things, so this story, much like many others of mine, have the same beginning and ending. i'm lame. a thousand thank-yous to everyone who gave a shit about this story, tbh. you da real mvp(s).


End file.
